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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a story that may repeat itself in all mountainous areas dependent on glaciers for their water supply, the glaciers in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range are melting so quickly (PDF) that the water they supply to the arid region is being threatened 20-30 years earlier than expected. Of the time needed for the region to adapt to the coming water shortages, previously thought to be decades, researchers now believe, 'those years don't exist.'"

Well, considering that humans didn't arrive in South America until around 15,000 years ago, 40,000 years is out. But more likely most if not all of the area under the glaciers in Peru has never before been seen by human eyes. 15,000 years ago the last glaciation was winding down so the glaciers were probably much bigger than they are now. I doubt those glaciers have ever been significantly smaller since then than they are now.

There have been a couple of stories about 3000 to 5000 year old corpses recovered from these melting glaciers. One of the is famous, but I've forgotten his name. Igwi or something. Ohhh, here, I'll google for a couple stories:

This melt off should be an interesting opportunity for archaeology and paleontology. Will such treasures reach back 1000, 5000, 40,000 years?

Possibly. I know there have been instances where parts of mid-Twentieth Century air crashes were recovered (including body parts whose prior owners have been identified). And the Iceman's state of presentation indicates that he had not been melted out since he died ~5000 years ago.

What measures will a mountain dwelling people take to supplement their loss of glacial water supply? They will lose their way of life, same as anyone else in a permanent drought, say in an extreme example Texas continues it's drought pattern. All it will take is a few more years to destroy life there as they know it.

But they can always hope rains will return. People dependent on glaciers that vanished have no such hope. Their total ancestral way of life will also have vanished.

The authoritative sources are the original research. The IPCC role is merely as a compiler and summarizer of the full breadth of climate study and it does no original data collection or research of its own so it has nothing to hide (to answer BenJCarter below).

Unfortunately, and as always, wattsupwiththat does nothing to deal with the basic claims, but instead has a lot of snark about whitewashing and how history shows that the projections are completely wrong. And as always, Watt's will not publish his own studies demonstrating his claims, or if he does, he will be laughed out of the science room.

It does. Governments around the world are planning on spending trillions of dollars and rerouting much of the energy structure in response to these reports. The reports are based on a few computer models and a few more wild predictions [newscientist.com]. The programmers here know that computer programs can be wrong, and we all know the wild predictions can be wrong. We want to see the source code and check things ourselves. The IPCC has not done that, and in fact has hidden the source code.

slashdotters are by far the stupidest people I've ever conversed with on the topic of climate change and global warming.

Really? I've never found any other place (other than, say, a climatologist convention) where a reasonable number of people have even read the IPCC report. Here there are a lot of people who actually do understand the science, at least large parts of it. Seriously, even on climatologist blogs it just breaks down into blogger-worshipers and angry people who came from another blog. Here you can post something that you've been reading about climatology and get some reasonable (if at times rude) responses, that give you things to think about.

it's all fuzzy, intuited 'science' from physicists and programmers with zero understanding of ecology

Maybe you just say this because people disagree with you? I've seen LOTS of people give sources for their statements, not everyone, but vastly more than on any other site. Especially if you ask them.

There's flame wars and there's truth - climate is changing, and unexpectedly fast. Much faster than we expected. And at this point I actually don't care anymore it is fault of capitalists, libertarians, commies, or what else. How we could expect to get our shit together if we even can't agree that change is happening? How we gonna *survive*?

This is fault of uneducated crowd making political decisions, t.i. electing populist leaders who won't say anything unpleasant to them. You can be pro-business and pro-capital and still capable to deliver harsh news *and* a plan how to deal with a problem. Unfortunately, there is serious shortage of such people (I don't even talk about politicians).

In nutshell, people don't like bad news and they do anything in their power to avoid them (also group thinking in our capitalist society pushing them to avoid take a blame) - that's human nature. Be that flame wars, denials, demolition of the messenger - whatever. Also your whining is part of the "I don't wanna listen because no one here is expert and I don't wanna hear that we have screwed up everything" crowd.

Why is the parent marked Troll? Closed borders are exactly why people can't move en-mass from one area of the planet to another... And countries that are upset by such serious issues and cannot sustain broad migration are not suitable for internal migration.

In fact, it seems a perfectly logical response to the post it was referencing...

These are people who lived in places with water. And that water is going to go away, suddenly, as could happen to literally any source of water other than desalinated ocean.

The history of the human race has involved a great deal of migration. Unfortunately, the earth is now full, and there is no place to migrate to anymore which is not already oversubscribed. Migration from now on means war.

They grow their food in the places that are not city (most of the world, based on the first link) and import it in. They'd just have to leave open the most fertile growing regions and put the city elsewhere. Or, they grow their food vertically in vertical farms (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming [wikipedia.org]). I'm sure we could come up with some sort of technological solution to where and how we grow food if we all lived in one large city.

One problem is big ass North Americans taking too much food and space.

That's the problem??? If there were less people on the planet we'd all be able to take up more food and space... seems like the problem is too many people. To take your argument to the ridiculous, if we all lived in 2m x 1m x 1m (taller people would need to bend their knees) boxes being fed nutrients intravenously there would be room for 5 x 10^14 people (assuming the boxes could float on the ocean), and that's only if we stack them 1 box deep. That doesn't mean those people would have a happy existence.

That's the problem??? If there were less people on the planet we'd all be able to take up more food and space... seems like the problem is too many people.

Bingo!
All the major issues we face are because there's too many people.
Famine? too many people, not enough food.
Oil crisis? Too many people, not enough oil.
Global Warming? Too many people, not enough trees
If by some bizarre occurance the planet was restricted to a stablised population of much less than now (let's start with 1Billion people for arguments sake), then pretty much most of the major problems would disappear overnight.
This is why I have a big problem with charity. While it sounds bad to not

If your premise is that you need less people I think statistics indicate that helping people in need would be your best bet (in addition to sounding, as you put it, less bad). As I understand the general mechanism, people tend to compensate for uncertainty regarding the survival of their offspring by having more children. With access to for example better medication, the argument goes, parents can afford to have fewer babies.

There are some places in which the population currently exceeds its carrying capacity. It's foolish to extrapolate that to the entire planet.

The problem is not having enough food--there is more than enough food on Earth to feed every person on the planet. The problem is distribution--and economics, politics, etc. The problem is getting the food to the people who need it.

The real problem is corruption and greed and just plain evil in governments, and in some places, in the society and culture as well. The real problem is people who don't work together as a community or a nation but instead play "every man for himself", seeking not the common good but to gratify oneself.

We don't need less people--we need fewer evil people. We need more good people.

Your suggesting that we need a global population reduction is a dehumanizing proposition, devaluing the lives of billions of real human beings. It is people like you who are the problem, people wanting to selfishly "cut off the dead weight" for the sake of themselves--people who think they are more important than everyone else. Shame on you.

So we're at a mere 60% of the absolute maximum capacity even now? You realize, right, that at max capacity, one extra person born means one dies. Now think about the mechanism of how that happens. Now think about whether or not that mechanism would be operating even now. Now you're getting it.

"You realize, right, that at max capacity, one extra person born means one dies."

It's worse than that. The deaths will be delayed, starvation will increase, making lots of people susceptible to disease. Eventually a breaking point will be reached and there will be a collapse and many more than just the "each extra" will die. You also have the problem that food production varies over time. What the Earth can support one year, may not be enough for the next. We don't even know the sustained long term of 100+

There is quite a bit of unused land in Detroit right now. Seriously people generally don't seem to like cities, and from what I see only live in them when they have no other viable alternative, Humans seem more likely "Village People" than "City People". Even when people do live in cities, they self-organize into neighborhoods, when can be likened to "villages" inside the cities.

The earth is in no way full, there is plenty of space for everybody.. Probably what you meant to say is that the earth is now fully claimed and the folk wallowing in luxury don't really want to share with poverty stricken peruvians.

Not everyone believes in evolution, which is part of the problem, but this is an issue of time scales.

Species go extinct because they could not adapt to the environment. That is normal. What is not normal is man made acceleration of environmental changes. Where I live there used to be an ocean, but that was on geological time. What we are doing is like radically changing the temperature and pressure in a room in 1/1,000,000 of a second.

You misunderstand evolution. Any adaptation that allows for survival in a given environmental condition is *already* there when that given environmental condition appears. It just so happens that everyone that *doesn't* have that adaptation dies off. Natural *selection* picks for traits that have already existed. An organism doesn't observe the environment and suddenly tries to "evolve".

You misunderstand evolution. Well, at least your comprehension of it isn't as absolute as you seem to think. The scenario you put forth is one possible example of evolution, but not the only possible one. A more likely scenario is one in which the environmental change is fairly gradual and, during the transition, a variation occurs making some subset of organisms more able to survive in the conditions the environment is transitioning to. The case where the environment shifts overnight is almost certainly less common and, even when it does occur, it's still more likely that the mutated subset of organisms that take over the niche don't come from the affected region, but repopulate it from nearby areas unaffected by the environmental change.

In any case, the kind of changes that require rapid adaptation by a population generally aren't very pleasant for the population. They're usually mostly, or absolutely destructive to the local population. Humans, as a species, or in smaller groupings, can survive all kinds of things. That doesn't mean that big changes don't cause all kinds of suffering and death on the individual level, however. This is something that some people seem to misunderstand (or callously dismiss when it doesn't affect them directly) leading to statements like "Don't live in places without water, stupid".

He understands it just fine. Take the polar bear, for example. It's dependent on arctic ice forming in the ocean so it can go out and hunt seals. Now, if that ice were to be drastically reduced over the course of a couple thousand years, the polar bear would have some time to adapt to finding new sources of food or migrate. But make that drastic reduction in ice over the course of a few decades, and now the bear doesn't have the time to make those adjustments without flirting with extinction.

Cosmic irony would be that wealth is used to save the lost rather than gain the stars.

I love space opera as much as the next gnerd, but unless Einstein was seriously wrong we're never going to gain the stars.

A life-long one-way trip to the nearest neighbors may be feasible, but it's not likely that anyone will every want to pay for it, and even less likely that there will be anywhere to live once we got there.

So basically the projections were wrong, but the culprit is the evil consumer who does not recycle his soup can, not the guy who made the projections in the first place.

Unless God himself gave the schedule for those glaciers to melt, the notion of having them melting "earlier than expected" is a joke.

I don't find this to be a joke. This just emphasizes how little we know about how the earth's systems will react to global warming. My fear is we won't listen to scientists until it is too late and we have killed off the majority of the organisms that help us counter the CO2 we are pumping into the air or the other effects, e.g. ocean acidification.

I don't find this to be a joke. This just emphasizes how little we know about how the earth's systems will react to global warming. My fear is we won't listen to scientists until it is too late and we have killed off the majority of the organisms that help us counter the CO2 we are pumping into the air or the other effects, e.g. ocean acidification.

I'm reminded of the kid who won the Ontario science fair by figuring out how to biodegrade plastic bags. Everyone always told him that it would take thousands of years for bacteria to break down those bags, so he instantly saw that if they break down in thousands of years, something's doing it, and that something can be cultured.

The environment changes, the organisms change. The universe loves organisms, and she'll never stop springing them up in places you'd never think you'd find them.

The environment changes, the organisms change. The universe loves organisms, and she'll never stop springing them up in places you'd never think you'd find them.

More realistic version: The environment changes, the organisms die, or at least the ones unsuitable for the new environment die. Evolution is a process of death, either death as an early termination of an organism, or death as a failure to pass on genes. If you step back and look at the grand process of life, it has a beauty to it. The great Permian Triassic extinction brought the rise of the dinosaurs, and the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed a whole new set of species to appear, including our own.

But when you bring it down to your own life, a moral person cannot possibly take pleasure in the thought of the extinction of his children, of his grandchildren, let alone the extinction of his entire species. And that is really at the heart of the issue of global warming. The geological record gives good evidence that (a) the climate can get a great deal warmer than it is today and (b) that those periods of warming are associated with large scale extinctions. There is strong evidence that a warming world will have a profoundly different distribution of precipitation. Given that our current agricultural systems are dependent on our current precipitation patterns, it seems likely that changing precipitation patterns will result in a reduction in agricultural production. If there is less food in the world, then famine is likely to result. The systems we have developed where most of us can live in cities while others far away grow our food will be put under stress. A survey of history will clearly show what happens then. The disinterested intellectual systems of reason decay. Fear grows with material shortages, and with it grows superstition. Humans start to lose track of objective reality, they start to make decisions based on illusion and superstition. As they lose track of reality, humans become increasingly unable to implement the necessary changes to survive in a changing world.

If you want to get an idea of what I am talking about, read about the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages, especially in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Read about the major mass extinctions, and then ponder the question whether humans would have been able to rise above the environmental pressures that destroyed more than 90% of species in the time of the dinosaurs. And even if we weren't to go extinct, consider what it would look like of 90% of us were to die. Not just 90% of those in some far away desert, but 90% of the people in your own country. Consider what such a world would look like. It won't happen tomorrow. It won't happen next year, nor even in a decade. If you live another 30 years, you will see enough to see the shape of things to come. But you will still be able to consume comfortably for some time to come. It is your children who will have to deal with the consequences of your selfish consumption.

The environment changes, the organisms change. The universe loves organisms, and she'll never stop springing them up in places you'd never think you'd find them.

I don't think anyone is seriously afraid for life on earth as a whole. But the changing environment may well be very, very unfriendly to some current species. Such as Homo Sapiens. And that is worth worrying about.

My fear is we won't listen to scientists until it is too late and we have killed off the majority of the organisms that help us counter the CO2 we are pumping into the air or the other effects, e.g. ocean acidification.

You mean listen to the scientists that were wrong in their predictions regarding this glacier melt in the first place?

Yeah, that sounds like it'll turn out well.

This just emphasizes how little we know about how the earth's systems will react to global warming.

If we, by your own admission, know so little about the Earth's climate system, why in $DEITY's name would anyone think it's a good idea to engage in attempting to modify the behavior of a system we don't understand and can't predict, particularly when such proposed attempts come at great cost, suffering, and death to huge numbers of people?

You mean listen to the scientists that were wrong in their predictions regarding this glacier melt in the first place?

Wrong in that they *underestimated* how bad the problem is. And for you, this is reason to further ignore them? Now just to prove to us that you can't even maintain internal logical coherence across 2 simple sentences, we have:

If we, by your own admission, know so little about the Earth's climate system, why in $DEITY's name would anyone think it's a good idea to engage in attempting to modify the behavior of a system we don't understand and can't predict

Well, since the only way to accomplish that is to slaughter most of humanity and have the survivors return to hunter-gatherer existence or just have humans perform a self-extinction, that's not an acceptable option.

Or, you know, stop over consumption and make do with a perfectly reasonable lifestyle based on energy saving technologies that have been around for decades.

The problem isn't humanity, the problem is shortsighted, selfish little shits like yourself that were ready to crucify Carter for suggesting

It sure is not a joke. Unfortunately, it is a problem which is more serious, and potentially extremely more serious than we collectively realize.
New York Times, Dec. 16 [nytimes.com]:

Edward A. G. Schuur, a University of Florida researcher who has done extensive field work in Alaska, is worried by the changes he already sees, including the discovery that carbon buried since before the dawn of civilization is now escaping. “To me, it’s a spine-tingling feeling, if it’s really old carbon that hasn’t been in the air for a long time, and now it’s entering the air,” Dr. Schuur said. “That’s the fingerprint of a major disruption, and we aren’t going to be able to turn it off someday.”

I suspect the "spine-tingling" part might have to do with the Permian-Triassic extinction (90%+ of all species wiped): A rise of a few degrees in temperature led to massive release of methane which brought a total 6-degree rise, which led to total mayhem for life on Earth, and which best current explanation [bris.ac.uk] is:

The cause of the burp was probably global warming triggered by huge releases of CO2 from the Siberian Traps. Methane is a greenhouse gas too, so a big burp raises global temperatures even further. Normally, long-term global processes act to bring greenhouse gas levels down. This kind of negative feedback keeps the Earth in equilibrium. But what happens if the release of methane is so huge and fast that normal feedback processes are overwhelmed? Then you have a "runaway greenhouse". This is a positive feedback system: excess carbon in the atmosphere causes warming, the warming triggers the release of more methane from gas hydrates, this in turn causes yet more warming, which leads to the release of more methane and so on. As temperatures rise, species start to go extinct. Plants and plankton die off and oxygen levels plummet. This is what seems to have happened 251 million years ago.

That sure seems an extreme scenario, easy to swipe aside because of its extreme nature. Problem is, we can't, in all intellectual honesty, really dispel it. Replacing the "Siberian Traps" with the "burning of fossil fuels" means we are currently on a path toward a future in which that scenario has a higher likelihood, whatever it is.
Unfortunately, the laws of nature don't care about the personal worldview and state of mind of each of us, and no amount of sarcasm has ever been able to counteract the natural laws, the (relatively short in geological time) human historical record is clear on that.

It is too late. Temperatures drag behind carbon dioxide levels because the Earth needs time to warm up, and positive feedback loops - such as methane release from melting tundra - are already kicking in. At this point it's impossible to stop climate change, so the focus should be shifted on adapting and maintaining civilization's cohesion until the new climate stabilizes in a few hundred years.

The real question is this: are the estimated figures (which the scientists initially used to base their predictions) wrong due to accelerated climate change - things like mean and maximum temperatures? Or were the scientists wrong simply because they didn't understand the model well enough, or had a bad model on which they based their predictions?

Understanding why the estimation was off by decades might be important information to know, and all that. I am personally highly skeptical that an average temperature change in the region of a tenth of a degree or whatever it has been over the past decade could be responsible for this.

It's also possible that the size of the glaciers was initially wrong, too. Or maybe the rate or amount of melt was improperly estimated.

Is it possible this is just more reactionary knee-jerk fear-mongering bullshit due to a larger-than-normal rainfall in Peru this past year? That couldn't possibly be it, could it? I happen to know there are other places in the world which have had lower than average rainfalls this past year. (A more likely explanation may be that Peru has been stealing all of the clouds...)

Good news. You managed to show absolute ignorance in only 4 important areas (that's 1 per sentence) with that brilliant comment. Those being: meteorology, geography, South American history, and USA history. You might benefit from knowing that the Incas were the native people of Peru (the Mayans being more central America), and that reasonably accurate records of rainfall exist wherever farming is important, and that "Union soldiers" were combatants in the American Civil War several thousand miles away - alt

You might want to look at this [wikipedia.org] Wikipedia article. It's a timeline of meteorology. Apparently you have some severe misunderstandings about how long human beings have been taking note of the weather.

How can you know what kind of weather occurred in Peru over the last 150 years? Did someone find Mayan engravings? Or there is this very old guy that can swear that this never happened since he was born? Or maybe it was a Union soldier that got lost and decided to start a weather journal?

Ok, I have some homework for you. Go home and read your textbook on Sedimentology, focussing specifically on lake sediments caused by runoff. Read about how the flows of rivers can be read by drilling sediment cores out of lake beds. Then find your textbook on Glaciology, and read about how cores of ice drilled from long term ice deposits can be used to track snowfall. While you are at it, you can read about how rainfall events leave specific signatures in sand and dirt, including rivulets and specific patterns in the distribution of different sizes of sedimentary particles. I suspect snowfall events could also be inferred with similar observations.

You would be amazed at what geologists and geographers can find out simply by using observation and logic.

I give an outline of a scientific argument. You give sneering insults. It is only technobabble to someone with no background in geology. My outline of topics is basic sedimentology. Smaller sedimentary particles take longer to settle than larger particles. Faster water picks up more and larger particles than slower water. Seasonal patterns in sediment deposition give delineation of years. In this way, past precipitation patterns may be inferred. As to rivulets, you should read about how we infer the past existence of liquid water on Mars. Your agressive and content free reply betrays the insecurity of ignorance.

Okay, please try to understand this. People _live_ there. There are important mining interests there. It's a desert. Knowing about rainfall in the area is important for a number of reasons. For example, if there's a heavy wet season every ten years ago in an otherwise dry area, you get mudslides. You hear about that sort of thing in the news all the time where unexpected heavy rains have just killed hundreds or thousands of people in a typically dry region. Your childish dismissal of an entire, important, field of study as an example of "the least optimally spent money" is pathetic. The people who study these things and tell people "don't build your homes there or you'll be killed by mudslide/flood/earthquake/fire/etc. within 20 years" are doing a very important job, not wasting money, and saving people's lives. They're also too frequently not listened too.

You're clearly a judgemental guy. I'm sure you've watched flood victims on TV frequently and sneered at what morons they are and told anyone who would listen that they deserved it for living in a flood plain in the first place. Given that, do you think that research into what the 100-year flood level is (and into how that level will change due to all the human construction with it's well-engineered drainage systems) is wasted?

How can you know what kind of weather occurred in Peru over the last 150 years?

The fact that this Peruvian desert had no precipitation left it as one of the few places on earth with sodium nitrate prior to WWI. Europeans imported it for fertilizer and explosives. Germany had to devise a way to synthesize nitrate for their war efforts.

So yes, many people historically were aware of the lack of precipitation in that Peruvian desert and what the recorded precipitation was by the locals due to it being an extremely rare event.

I am personally highly skeptical that an average temperature change in the region of a tenth of a degree or whatever it has been over the past decade could be responsible for this.

You assume the local change is the same as the global mean change. In fact, due to the way a mean value is calculated, change in the global mean temperature can be caused by localised small or large increases and decreases. Also, check out the global mean deviation from ice age to temperate Earth and associated climatic events... you may be surprised by how change of the mean temperature by only a few degrees has historically caused a collapse in global fish stocks.

Unless God himself gave the schedule for those glaciers to melt, the notion of having them melting "earlier than expected" is a joke.

You can replace "earlier than expected" with "faster than previously projected" if that helps. Most people don't need the help to understand it.

The next time I make yearly projections about storage usage for a client and they get pissed because they run out of space in the middle of the year, I'll remember to spin this as a growth that is "faster than previously projected".

Unfortunately (for me), when I suck at making projections I lose contracts because my salary is not subsidized.

Scientists, when they made those projections, were being conservative, just including the factors they were sure of and discounting factors that were not well characterized yet. How much ridicule would you be heaping on them if they had overstated their projections?

If you're estimating how many years of fresh water you have left, that's an engineering question. "Being conservative" means erring on the short end, rather than the long end. Factors which are not well characterized yet are assumed to be worst case, not discounted. Basically, you're trying to answer "What's the worst that could happen, so I can plan ahead for it?"

OTOH, if you're estimating the melt rate for glaciers for a study on climate change, then that's a science question. "Being conservative" m

You sound hopelessly confused. First you needlessly dispute the meaning of conservative by providing two definitions and then apply them differently to the same scenario. Then you throw in a non-sequitur reductio ad absurdum claiming "climate science" has no place estimating fresh water supply. The only way this argument is remotely coherent is if you assume that "engineering" is unrelated to science. However, that is completely ridiculous as engineering is applied science.

I'm not confused at all. Engineering and science have different goals. Science seeks to discover facts. Engineeering seeks to design systems which work, even in the face of uncertainty about facts.

I did not claim that climate science had no place in estimating fresh water supply. I merely pointed out that if you choose to do so, you must change your assumptions to reflect your change in goal: Discovery of physical phenomena, vs. construction of a system which will operate under the influence of thos

I agree 100% with this comment. In the end some form of life will survive, I even think that humans will survive. We will just shrink our population and lose our advancements in technology, we will be cavemen again...

Runaway GW could turn the planet into a desert, with no life but microbes (if any). I think some planetologists think that's how Mars got its wonderful climate.

Barring that, I don't think we'll be reduced to cavemen. We'll just have more wars and social disturbances, as the agricultural/hydraulic "haves" become "have-nots", and vice versa.

And of course, we'll have to start moving our coastal cities to higher ground in 50-100 years.

Extremophiles will hang around even after extinction level events - those things are currently living in the most acid, heated places of our planet; granted, if earth got stripped down to its core by a local supernova or our own star decided to call it a day life would have a hard time, but the sky turning black and oceans turning red wont be enough.

Let's be realistic. Man will not go back to being a caveman. Population may shrink, but unless something truly horrifying happens mankind will go on. We'll probably innovate in different ways but we'll go on.

Of course humanity will survive, we're like cockroaches, but there's no reason (except profit) to make life harder for everyone. Otherwise, why not just nuke everything?

For heaven's sake, sometimes I think that the reason we have so many problems around the world today is what appears to be an incredibly cynical, doomsday view of everything. I could blame it on pervasive media (negative headlines are the best headlines), but that feels cliche.

Media sells entertainment, only a fool would take them seriously. Still, if you trust climatologists over uneducated opinions you know there's a very good chance that we're fucked.

For heaven's sake, sometimes I think that the reason we have so many problems around the world today is what appears to be an incredibly cynical, doomsday view of everything.

And ironically life has never been better. We've conquered major diseases. Childhood death is rare: how many people in your family died young? In mine none, but in my great-grandma's, 14 out of 16 died as children. Go back farther, during the black death as much as 60% of the population of Europe died in two years. That is something no AGW scenario dreams of, and yet it happened.

In the worst case, we won't die out, we will go back to how things were before.

Actually, there's mass methane poisoning [realclimate.org] of our atmosphere if the gas melts out of glaciers faster than the biosphere can handle it:

The juiciest disaster-movie scenario would be a release of enough methane to significantly change the atmospheric concentration, on a time scale that is fast compared with the lifetime of methane. This would generate a spike in methane concentration. For a scale of how much would be a large methane release, the am

Maybe I should have said, no realistic AGW scenario, there hasn't been a single peer reviewed paper saying that there will be a mass extinction from the methane that is released in the arctic. Even the thing you linked to doesn't claim it, all it does is try to make you think about it.

The quote you have there is exciting, but even the article it came from doesn't support it.

A friend in Reno says the mountains (between Reno and Lake Tahoe) aren't even snowcapped this year; that it looks more like the first dusting they usually get in September or October.

Of course, lack of snow in winter may just mean *dry*, not warm. Lack of snow doesn't disprove GW any more than last year's storms prove it. Receding glaciers is a different matter, if it continues year after year. Already 5-10 years ago they were saying that Glacier National Park had lost half its glaciers. And this kind o

Must stop using electricity and save the planet before man made global warming frees us from this ice age we're in.

By some accounts, GW is in fact counteracting the onset of an ice age. Unfortunately, according to these analyses, GW's forcing is much stronger the IA's forcing, so it's not keeping us in a stable state. (Hence the melting glaciers, shifting habitats, etc.)

If we could cut our GW's forcing back to a small fraction of what it is, we might be able to apply it as some practical terraforming, to extend the duration of the paradise that our species grew up in.

But most people just invoke "ice age" as an excuse to avoid doing something that will cost a lot of money in the short run.

And an *enormous* amount of money in the long run. Politicians like to fall down and kick their feet over the public debt that our descendants will inherit, but those same clowns don't care a fig if we leave them a foobar planet to live in.

avoid doing something that will cost a lot of money in the short run. And an *enormous* amount of money in the long run.

I'm interested in your source for this. The only reason I'm asking is because of an article I read early this year in one of the Business Review Weekly magazines. The economist was arguing the exact opposite, that the global effort to change the lifestyle and energy sources of half the population of the world would be orders of magnitude more expensive than to simply adapt as a species and relocate or provide resources in some other means to people dispersed by global warming.

Of course this ignores any emotional attachment which people have to their homes, but I can see where he may be making a valid point. For example the system rolled out in Australia is an incredible economic reform and some say it will cost the nation over $1trillion in GDP over the next 38 years. That's a lot of money for a 0.0005% reduction in carbon output in the world.

I think we as a species need to come up with a smarter way of tackling this problem because if the numbers are right we'd basically be bankrupting the world to get humans carbon neutral.

For example the system rolled out in Australia is an incredible economic reform and some say it will cost the nation over $1trillion in GDP over the next 38 years.

You ask for a source for his claim, then throw that out there in the same post without any hint of a source? (And Andrew Bolt isn't a source. Indeed, he's an anti-Source. He (and his ilk) suck the validity out of any claim they make.)

The Carbon Credit scheme is supposedly revenue negative, that is, the amount of "compensation" and tax cuts exceeds the amount of carbon tax added. It will have a minimal effect on long term revenue, and therefore a minimal effect on the GDP. How would it somehow cost us $26 bi

The number does ring the bs alarm, but the premise does not. Australia is a country which makes the vast majority of its wealth through the export of carbon intense products, mainly coal, iron, and all that other wonderful stuff. The tax cuts are directed at isolating Australians from the increase in cost that the carbon tax puts on producers. Unfortunately that ultimately makes us less competitive on the world market. The government's own numbers recognise this. They've address and acknowledged that the in

The economist was arguing the exact opposite, that the global effort to change the lifestyle and energy sources of half the population of the world would be orders of magnitude more expensive than to simply adapt as a species and relocate or provide resources in some other means to people dispersed by global warming.

But I will have to go with "nonsense" on that diagnosis.

Haven't read the article, can't comment on the said economists motives but I am fairly sure that he/she IS making his/her arguments from an ignorant position and a with a highly specialized and limited outlook of the world.

First off, saying "half the population" indicates that he lives in some past age when the developed nations (ones who are responsible for the greater part of the human influence on the climate) were approximately one half of the world population.Which is no longer the case. "Traditionally poor" continents of Asia and Africa amount to ~5 billion of the ~7 billion humans currently on this planet.

Second, rest assured that the poor nations would be the ones who would feel the effects of global warming the most.Millions would likely die from hunger, wars caused by said hunger and health issues (disease and lack of medicine) caused by both.

Calculating the "cost" of change in developed nations energy policy merely in dollars, when it is clear to anyone who would take 5 minutes to meditate on the subject that the current policies would cost in lives, lost generations and even in those utterly immeasurable categories such as loss of culture and civilization indicates that the proponent of the "just send aid" has traded his/her moral compass for something more... quantifiable.

Then, there is the problem of "WTF?" in such a solution.We can't adapt energy policy of developed nations with their (comparably) functioning economies and bureaucracies but at the same time it is a perfectly acceptable idea that we should be able "to simply adapt as a species"?I'm guessing this will be accomplished through spontaneous mutation of chlorophyll cells in our bodies so that we can harvest the energy of the Sun, dispensing with that pesky habit of eating altogether?Or perhaps by growing gills and webbed hands and feet so that we can live under water?

Then there is the utter lack of foresight. Which does not surprise me since the said economist is working with numbers from decades ago.I.e. Is stuck in the past.

We don't need a solution for a world of 5, 6 or 7 billion people, with maybe half of them living in the developed nations.We need an adaptable, scalable solution for at least 9 billion humans, with at least 7 billion of them living in the developing nations.Which is where we will be 40 or so years down the road, just as the world's supply of oil nears the end of its economical use.

And saying to those 7 billion "Ah, just move somewhere else" basically means "Come, take my already strained resources - you're gonna take them by force anyway since you and yours outnumber me and mine by 4 to 1. And you've grown up in the society where human life is very cheap.".

So, unless we come up with cold fusion in the next decade or so we MUST start relying on renewable energy resources.Cause "poor" of the world sure as hell will not. Can not.At the same time they will be faced with increased population and dwindling resources - perfect conditions for declaring war.On their cousins, on their neighbors, on the "wealthy", on those of a different color...

So, developed nations either come up with a solution for both energy and the climate crisis and give it to the developing nations OR be faced with the possibility of being on a losing side of a global war couple of decades down the road.Not that there can be a winning side in a war whose goal is to manage couple of billion humans through reduction of their numbers.It's just that some people have a lot less to lose.

Look at the glaciers as a key reserve of water for the dry season. A glacier in equilibrium will replenish itself during wet season, and act as a source of water during dry season. A melting glacier means it doesn't replenish itself during wet season, and thus a diminishing source during dry season. At some point it means a lost source of water during dry season.